Renée Baillargeon

Renée Baillargeon, born in 1954, is a Canadian American research psychologist and distinguished professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies how cognition develops in infancy. She trained at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, where her doctoral supervisors were Rochel Gelman and Elizabeth Spelke, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. She is best known for showing that very young infants have expectations about solidity, containment and occlusion. Using the violation of expectation method, in which infants look longer at physically impossible events, she argued that Piaget underestimated object permanence because young infants lack the motor skills to search, not the understanding. She later extended the work to psychological, sociomoral and biological reasoning. Critics such as Schoner and Thelen question whether longer looking shows surprise. Her honors include the APA Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.